Hegel's challenge for Karl Rahner

If women, men and queer are concerned about their liberty and dignity, if they are concerned about a life within conditions of the rule of Human Rights law, they are called to claim health and dignity for their lives and enter a discourse with the validity conditions for their claim that is the rule of Human Rights law. These validity conditions are discussed within range of validity, that is the bio-psychical, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual aspects, facts and circumstances that make up the integrity of the discourse partners (ibid.: 109). What about the agency to turn from one’s standpoint of relative well-being to the needs of others and start to help? Theories of justice and social choice certainly try to improve the social conditions of women, men and queer. Amartya Sen wants to continue to believe in the general pursuit of justice by women, men and queer. He wants to base his theory of justice and the whole family of theories of justice on common human nature, on our feelings, concerns, and mental abilities (Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice. 414 London: Penguin). He is right, “we could have been creatures incapable of sympathy, unmoved by the pain and humiliation of others, uncaring of freedom, and—no less significant—unable to reason, argue, disagree and concur” (ibid.: 414–415).

Since the nineteenth century, theories of justice are inseparably involved with the concepts of freedom, reason, self-consciousness, and the recognition of the dignity of other persons. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the most systematic effort of Western philosophy of connecting these ideas and their application to social and political reality (Duquette, David A. 2019. “Hegel: Social and Political Thought.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The person is the bearer or holder of individual rights; but Hegel did not only treat the recognition of the objective laws and institutions of the state by the individual personal self-consciousness, freedom and will. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, the first part of his system of science from 1807, he works out his philosophical system reflecting on the absolute spirit of absolute self-consciousness as the absolute freedom that recognizes itself in the dialectical movement of the mind that negates the cultural forms of the Christian faith as constructions of one’s mind and reason as self-conscious spirit.

Hegel’s critique of the Christian religion and faith as a valid but imperfect expression of the self-conscious spirit that would be capable of recognizing and identifying itself as the absolute spirit of absolute freedom, needs an answer from the Christian theologians. To my knowledge, the only theologian who collaborated in the commissions of the Second Vatican Council and who had studied Hegel was Karl Rahner. In the academic year running from the fall of 1934 to the summer of 1935, Rahner attended Martin Heidegger’s seminaries on the Phenomenology of the Spirit of Hegel, on the Monadology by Leibniz and on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the University of Freiburg (Lotz, Johannes B. 1985. “Freiburger Studienjahre 1934–1936.” In Karl Rahner Bilder eines Lebens, edited by Paul Imhof and Huber Biallowons, 26–27. Freiburg: Herder). In January of 1987, I asked the director of the Karl Rahner Archive in Innsbruck, Walter Kern, if there were any notes in the archive that Rahner had taken in his seminaries with Heidegger.

I was convinced that Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith (Rahner, Karl. 1984. Grundkurs des Glaubens. Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums. Freiburg: Herder) could not hide their inspiration by the Phenomenology of the Spirit of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and I wanted to find some evidence of Rahner’s study of Hegel. On January 9, 1987, Walter Kern handed me the photocopies from an autograph of twenty-five pages from Rahner, asking me not to copy, not to pass on and not to publish the text. I do not know why this autograph was not included in the complete edition of Rahner’s works that was finished in 2018. The autograph is titled “Hegel Phänomenologie” and Rahner’s notes follow the table of contents of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1952. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner). Rahner starts his notes with the Preface on the epistemology of science, he continues with the parts Introduction, Consciousness, Self-consciousness and Reason. He takes notes on Observing Reason but does not any more treat the Realization of the reasonable Self-consciousness by itself and the following parts. The important chapters on The Spirit and on The Religion are not treated any more in Rahner’s notes. I do not think that Walter Kern was handing me over the incomplete autograph of Rahner. I rather suppose that Heidegger ended the study of the Phenomenology of the Spirit in his seminary at this point for some reason. Did Rahner go on studying the text by himself until the end of the Phenomenology of the Spirit? I do not know.

For Hegel, the problem of religion consists in the fact that religion represents the spirit for the subject but does not yet recognize the spirit as spirit that is consciousness of itself as spirit that is as a concept of the self-consciousness of the subject (Hegel 1952, 489).

According to Hegel, self-consciousness is a function of reason, and the spirit is a function of reason too, so to say the self-consciousness of reason as reason and spirit. There are many forms in history of the consciousness of the spirit as spirit and their representations make up the universe of religions (ibid.: 481). In history Hegel identifies the self-consciousness of reason as spirit as “faith of the world” that is as the general self-consciousness of the faith-community (ibid.: 532). The self-consciousness of the faith-community is capable of some reasoning but not capable of recognizing one’s faith as a concept of the self-consciousness of reason. According to Hegel’s reconstruction of the philosophy of religion, the self-conscious Christian subject is not capable of recognizing the spirit as a concept of the self-conscious conceptualizing mind. According to Hegel the Christian subject does not talk to the Christian community with the agency of the spirit that is conscious of itself as self-consciousness of reason as conceptualizing reasoning that is spirit. In 1979, that is three years after the publication of the “Foundations of Christian Faith” by Karl Rahner, Hans Georg Gadamer (Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1979. “Das Erbe Hegels.” In Das Erbe Hegels. Zwei Reden aus Anlaß des Hegel-Preises. By Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, 33–94. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp) frees the Hegelian dialectics of questions and answers form the self-isolation of the self-consciousness of the individual and develops the unity of dialogue and dialectics (ibid.: 52). The dialogue of individuals constructs, with the help of a hermeneutics of questions and answers, a community of communicative agencies that gives the individuals a chance to become subjects of history (ibid.).

Hegel’s concepts like consciousness, self-consciousness, freedom, spirit, etc. are expressions of language and elements of sentences written by Hegel. Today we understand speaking as explicit self-awareness or as the realization of the agency to speak. We realize this agency to say what the case is and doing things with words in speech-acts. Today we speak of dialogue and discourse constructed by speech-acts. Discourse, the social realization of a speech-act, is based on the agency of free speech that is realized as a social choice that is on a free decision to take the word. Yes, concepts or ideas like consciousness, self-consciousness, self-consciousness as freedom, self-consciousness of the subject as spirit, are concepts of thinking. We learned in the twentieth century that the sentences and significant propositions are the logical pictures of thoughts and thinking. “We make to ourselves pictures of facts” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus 2.1.In:  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. Side-by-side-by-side edition, version 0.42 (January 5, 2015), containing the original German, alongside both the Ogden/Ramsey, and Pears/McGuinness. London: Kegan Paul. http://writing.upenn.edu.library/Wittgenstein-Tractatus.pdf ). Our picture making uses language. To think we need to use language. Thinking about thinking and doing philosophy is philosophy of language, that is thinking about our use of language. “In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses” (Wittgenstein. Tractatus 3.1) and “A thought is a proposition with sense” (Wittgenstein. Tractatus 4).

Since Rahner attended seminaries of Heidegger interpreters of their thinking rightly document that Rahner was confronted with the thinking of Heidegger (Muck, Otto. 1994. “Heidegger und Karl Rahner.” In Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 116/3. 257-269. 257. Editor: Theological Faculty Innsbruck. Freiburg: Herder). In the end, Heidegger’s method philosophizing about “the thing”, that is the concepts of thinking, followed a philosophical interest. Rahner’s interest was in the end theological. Heidegger’s method is characterized as “phenomenological” (ibid. 261). He takes a German expression, treats it like a concept of reality and interprets hidden sense and hidden meaning. This method is a contradiction because it is generally agreed on that a concept is a well-defined expression, described with understandable predications. A concept does not need any further sense because the descriptions of the concepts are understandable, there is already sense and meaning, there is nothing hidden. Rather, Heidegger hides the evident, namely German language as origin of his German expressions which he uses as concepts. Heidegger hops like a bird from branch to branch searching at every hop the sense and hidden principle without recognizing that the branches are part of a tree.

Rahner will not speak of a hidden principle but asks for the “possibility condition” of “the thing”, the “being” as “being” and “man as finite being” (ibid. 261). Heidegger seems aware of the circular structure of his human knowledge of being that he reveals in an endless circular effort to find some meaning for his questions about man’s being. He interprets “being” and does not see that “being” is a picture of language, a sensibly perceptive expression that he uses and has learned to use. “Being” is not a mysterious hidden truth, “being” is an expression of language. Heidegger can’t see the tree for the branches. If he would see the German tree, he would not see the forest for the trees, because his language is German and he thinks in German and does not recognize the universe of languages used by women, men and queer on earth.

Rahner’s interest in dealing with “being”, with “man’s being”, and with “the being of existence” is theological, not phenomenological, and not ontological. Rahner looks for some principle or absolute being that enables him to overcome the perception of the sense, he stands in the tradition of medieval metaphysics and wants to preserve metaphysics in modern times. Human knowledge, empirical knowledge, evidently does not render possible metaphysics. There is physics, but there is no metaphysics in this world. Rahner tries to overcome this impasse of the phenomenon of being by suggesting that we must ask for the possibility condition of being, of man being and of the being of human existence. Usually, we play the language game with possibility conditions in empirical sciences using a two valued logic with the truth values true and false. Rahner makes use of the concept of possibility condition for being as being in a way that is not part of this world, that is not part of the language games of empirical sciences. Rahner proposes that the principle of human knowledge and reality is God, who is not known by man as an object of reality, but as a transcendental possibility condition. This transcendental possibility condition is necessary as apriority condition of the knowing subject for the possibility for any empiric knowledge and intellectual abstraction (ibid. 261). It is legitimate to claim God as the possibility condition for women, men and queer to transcend the reality of senses and perceptibility, if one admits that this kind of interpreting the history of women, men and queer belongs to the category of sentences for which we do not have a truth value other than “We cannot know”. Trying to transcend with the help of a kind of “supranatural mode of existence” the finitude of our senses, perceptibility, the world, the intellect, and mind, cannot be affirmed as positive reality nor negated as false hypothesis. We just cannot know. It is my hope that there is Go’d who takes care of me, it is my belief that Go’d exists and holds my existence, it is my faith that Go’d will be the horizon of my life.

From 1934 to 1936 Karl Rahner studied philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau, in south-western Germany (Muck 1994. 258). Martin Heidegger was his most important teacher. Heidegger’s interpretation of the philosophers of the German philosophical Enlightenment formed Rahner’s philosophical mind and thinking. Rahner was 30 years old when he started his doctoral studies in Freiburg. He had already been trained for years in Jesuit formation houses in Thomist philosophy and theology. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the official philosophical and theological authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas’ thinking was prescribed as orthodox Catholic teaching and philosophers and theologians of the Aufklärung were banned from the formation of the Catholic clergy. Usually, a syllabus shows the subjects or books that must be studied in a course and for the exam. The syllabus that Pope Pius IX published in 1864, is a collection of errors that were condemned, like the equality of women and men, democracy, socialism, atheism, moral relativism, separation of church and state, and many more. In 1870 the pope lost the Vatican States to the Kingdom of Italy. Also in 1870, Pope Pius IX declared at the First Vatican Council papal infallibility in all dogmatic matters. His successor Pope Leo XII made Thomas Aquinas the supreme philosophical and theological Roman Catholic authority. In the following years, pontifical documents insisted on the obligation to accept Thomas as normative authority for Roman Catholic philosophy and theology. The last of these restrictive documents was published in 1923 (Coreth, Emerich. 1988. „Schulrichtungen neuscholastischer Philosophie.“ In: Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by E. Coreth – W.M. Neidl – G. Pfliegersdorffer. Bd.2: Rückgriff auf scholastisches Erbe. 397-410. Graz: Styria).

Authors who held views that were condemned by the syllabus of errors, were put on the “index of forbidden books”. This “index” was a list of publications that the Roman Catholic teaching authority declared heretical. Catholics were forbidden to print or read them. The index was finally abolished in 1966. At the time of the formation of Karl Rahner the normative authority of Thomas Aquinas was enforced with rigor by all Catholic bishops and religious superiors. Throughout his whole life Karl Rahner meticulously and systematically tried to justify in his thousands of publications every theological thought as being compatible with Thomistic thinking. In my opinion, this kind of compulsive efforts complicate the flow of his thoughts, unnecessarily lengthen and hollow out the persuasiveness of his arguments and finally suffocate his innovative interpretations of Christian faith in the corset of a vanished medieval worldview. Defenders of Rahner’s theology insisted therefore, that Rahner was not copying the theology of Thomas but tried to present a developed interpretation of Thomas using his transcendental method of hypothesizing God as the possibility condition of all human activity (Muck 1994. 260).

The first Roman Catholic theologian who interpreted Thomas after having studied Kant and German Idealism was the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal (1878-1944) (Muck 1988. 590-622). Maréchal held a doctorate in biology, in philosophy and in theology, and introduced what is called “the anthropologic turn” into the interpretation of Thomas. Thomas never spoke of the individual subject as producer of knowledge, truth, feelings, or social interactions as free choices. Thomas spoke of mankind in general, of man, and the individual was not an individual woman, man or queer. The individual was an abstract and anonym number, an individual quantity of the universal quality “human”. Even the old Karl Rahner tried to persuade himself and his readers, that Thomas had begun introducing this “anthropologic turn” into religious thought that still occupies European philosophies of the present (Rahner 1972. 11/20).

The great researcher of Thomas Aquinas, his Dominican brother Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895-1990) was more courageous than Rahner concerning an analysis of the theology of the Aquinas (Chenu, Marie-Dominique. 1950. Introduction à l`etude de saint Thomas d`Aquin. Montréal. Paris: Institut d‘études médiévale. Librairie  Philosophique J. Vrin). Chenu was accompanying and advising the movement of the French workers priests who shared the daily routine in the fabrics with the workers to show Christian presence in the atheist socialist and Marxist milieu of the workers’ unions. The priests fought in solidarity with the unions for just salaries and healthier conditions at the working place. Rahner never joined any social movement and stayed an attentive observer in the universities.

In 1936 Chenu was appointed rector of the Dominican formation house in Le Saulchoir, France. In 1937 he published Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (A school of theology. The Saulchoir), where he presented a reformed theological curriculum for the theological studies of the young Dominicans. He wanted to read and interpret the text of the Summa Theologica of the Aquinas and understand it within its social and historic context. This call to study the historic sources of theology for correcting the textbooks, was too much for the Roman censure, that prescribed the ruling interpretations of the Aquinas. The simplified and disfigured teachings of Thomism had to remain the unquestionable theological authority. In 1942 Chenu’s book was listed by the Roman Catholic authorities as forbidden book, Chenu lost the authorization to teach Catholic theology and had to leave the Saulchoir. When in 1959 Rome destroyed the movement of the workers priests, Chenu had to leave Paris and had to retreat into a convent in Rouen. He was not appointed by the pope as an official theological expert at the Second Vatican Council, although he inspired his colleagues who were working for reform of the theological formation of the clergy at the Council (Quisinsky 2012. 76-77).

In his book “Introduction to the study of Saint Thomas Aquinas” (Chenu 1950) he analyzed the Summa Theologiae (the Summa Theologica) of Thomas. Chenu explains that Thomas starts the first book of the Summa Theologica with dogmatic metaphysics of God as creator and preserver of created being. Thomas presents God as cause of all created, describes the “to be there” and essence of God, God’s life, knowledge and will, the creation of man and God’s government over the world. The first part of the second book of the Summa Theologica is also dogmatic and deals with sin, disobedience of God’s law and will, God’s New Covenant with mankind and his grace for sinful mankind on her way back to blessed and glorified God. The second part of the second book deals with the necessary way back of mankind to her creator and is about moral life. God’s grace enables the virtues of faith, hope and love, and all virtues of human life that will bring back mankind to her creator. The third book of the Summa Theologica finally deals with incarnation, that is Christ as mediator of the way back to God.

By the time of Chenu and Rahner, the hundreds of the so-called Questions - chapters that treated a theological problem - of the Summa Theologica got organized into different isolated units, the so-called treaties, or tractates. A professor was responsible for teaching one tractate and concentrated his energy on one specific topic. Since Moral theology was treated by Thomas in the second part of the second book of the Summa Theologica, Christian moral live, the virtues, the norms and laws of moral behavior and conduct was taught as acts of obedience to the will of God. Chenu interpreted the Questions of the Summan Theologica in the context of the text as a whole and recognized that Moral theology had lost contact to the tractate on grace at the end of the first part of the second book. This means that in the 19th and 20th century the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love were taught as obligations of the Christians to obey the will of God, and only then receive the status of grace. Thomas taught the other way round: God empowered man to have faith and hope and to realize social choices of love. This empowerment by God man receives as a gift, a manifestation of God’s gratuitous caring for the well-being of man. By the time of Chenu and Rahner were professors, grace was a tractate of the theological curriculum at the Catholic Theological faculties and study houses around the world. Grace was taught as part of dogmatic theology, not of moral theology. Rahner was teaching the tractate of grace in Innsbruck for 16 years trying to center the Christian’s existence on God’s gift of grace, abandoning obedience to generalized norms and moral laws as horizon of Christian behavior and introducing the importance of grace.

Chenu insisted on further analysis of the Summa Theologica that was not followed by Rahner. Chenu dryly comments that Thomas does not really need Jesus for his treating the dogma, that is the truths of Christian faith, and morals, that is the norms and duties of Christian life. When Thomas finally writes about incarnation in the third book of his Summa Theologica, he writes about the being of the Son of man, about Jesus’ life, suffering and resurrection, the sacraments, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, and about the sacrament of penance. Thomas writes in reality about the life of the Roman Catholic Church, not about Jesus. Jesus’ teaching the Gospel, Jesus’ healings and deeds, his encounters with sinners and Jewish authorities, Jesus’ call of disciples, the first community of Christians in Jerusalem and the formation of first communities outside of Palestine as narrated in Acts, are not necessary for the theological argumentation of Thomas. Chenu concludes that Jesus’ living with his male and female disciples and the crowds that follow him is somewhat lost at the periphery and theological speculation stands at the center of the Summa Theologica (Chenu 1950).

In the aula of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the reform of the formation of the priests in the seminaries always was a top priority in the speeches of important cardinals like Döpfner from Munich, Germany, like Suenens archbishop from Mechelen-Brussels, Belgium, and Lercaro from Bologna, Italy, and for bishops like Charue from Namur, Belgium, like Garonne from Toulouse, France, like Hurley from Durban, South Africa, and Weber from Strasbourg, France; these speakers had large personal experience in the formation of priests as educators, instructors and confessors (Grootaers, Jan. 1996a. “Il concilio si gioca nell’intervallo. La seconda preparazione e i suoi avversari.” In La formazione della coscienza conciliare. Il primo period e la prima intersessione ottobre 1962 – settembre 1963. Vol. 2 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 385–558. 525. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino 525).

The scheme on the formation of the priest passed with a positive vote on October 13, 1965, the Second Vatican Council, that is very late (Velati, Mauro. 2001. “Il completamento dell’ agenda conciliare.” In Concilio di transizione settembre – dicembre 1965. Vol. 5 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 197–284. 210. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino). The reform centered on the priority of the bible studies. The Bible must be the foundation of every teaching on the truths of faith and the history of the dogma was secondary. The mysteries of salvation must get studied in connection with the culture of the future priests and Thomas Aquinas can help reflecting tradition and faith but was not any more a normative theological authority (ibid.: 209). Accepting Bible studies, the Second Vatican Council did not view any more the biblical texts as cheap empirical proof for speculative theology. The Bible as practical quarry for killer arguments for verifying the positivity of all sorts of theological claims gave way to an understanding of the Bible as faith narrative. The Decree on priestly training Optatam Totius profited from this new understanding of the Bible as it had been developed in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum.

The mystical shows itself and it is indeed inexpressible because we cannot think beyond the limits of the world. Saying Go’d is “the first cause” that caused the world, claims something that is outside the world. The Second Vatican Council does not claim something that is outside the world; the Second Vatican Council affirms that Go’d is invisible (Dei Verbum 2), Go’d is unthinkable, Go’d is unspeakable. Using the word “Go’d” we cannot show whom we mean, because Dei Verbum rightly affirms that Go’d is invisible. The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum professes Jesus Christ as the revelation “of the invisible God”. “Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (Colossians 1;15, 1 Timothy 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (Exodus 33:11; John 15:14–15) and lives among them (see Baruch 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself” (Dei Verbum 2). Revelation cannot be separated from history; revelation takes place within a history of men and women. Dei Verbum 11 continues to claim three affirmations concerning inspiration and three references for their legitimation: “In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him” is the first claim. The second claim is that these chosen men “made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them.” The references for the claim that Go’d acted “in” the chosen men who composed the sacred books are Hebrews 1,1 “At many moments in the past and by many means, God spoke to our ancestors in the prophets”, and Hebrews 4,7 God “saying in David so long a time afterward”. The references that Go’d speaks “through” man are 2 Samuel 23,2 “The spirit of Yahweh speaks through me, his word is on my tongue” and Matthew 1,22 “the Lord had spoken through the prophet”. There is no word of Go’d as the author of the Scripture in number 11 of Dei Verbum, but there is a clear affirmation of the powers and abilities of the chosen men who composed the sacred books. Finally, they are called “true authors”. Papal encyclicals speak until 1920 CE of the authors of the Scripture as “instruments” or “secretaries” of Go’d, and Go’d was called author of the Scripture (Hoping, Helmut. 2005. “Dei Verbum.” In Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, vol 3, edited by Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath, 695–832. 766. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder). The claim that Go’d is the “principal author” of the Scripture is no longer made in Dei Verbum (ibid, 767). Thanks to Go’d there has been an evolution of Catholic teaching on inspiration. Inspiration describes the faith that the authors of the Sacred Scriptures got help from the Holy Spirit when writing the Gospel.

Karl Rahner accepted the findings and efforts of the Bible studies and discussed with the scholars of the Bible. In 1976 Rahner published his “Foundations of Christian Faith”, that is referred to as his theological summa. In this theological summa he used metaphysics as intellectual foundation and legitimation of man’s inquiry into who she and he is by introducing the concept of “God” as possibility condition of knowledge, history, freedom, and existential life. Transcendental ontology serves Rahner as instrument to deal with all systematic theology (Muck 1994. 267). At the end of his life, in his theological summa, Rahner refers quite in general to the New Testament, once he refers to Matthew 25, the last judgement, but there is not a single citation from the New Testament in the whole summa of Rahner who remains speculative, theoretic theologian, who seems not to care for the dignity, freedom and rights of the individual Christian woman, man and queer. It must be said, that 50 years after the “Foundations of Christian Faith” the German speaking official Roman Catholic professors of systematic dogmatic theology still do not know how to integrate their speculations with the texts of the Bible and bible studies.

A speech-act needs at least two persons, a speaker, and a listener. The equal dignity, freedom and rights of the speaker and the listener are rules, that speakers and listeners are invited to comply with. Validity conditions must be agreed on in their discourse in order to realize their dignity. The investigation of the social realization of dignity in a discourse is part of the discourse. This investigation identifies the claims to validity, the validity condition, the social range of the validity condition and discusses the fulfilment of the validity condition. I consider speech-acts therefore as social realizations of dignity with the help of sentences. There are no privileged sentences, the participants of a discourse investigate the claims of the sentences, the claims to validity, the validity condition its social range and the fulfilment of the validity condition. Sentences speak of what is the case; they show what the case is and say and claim that what the case is, is the case. Sentences speak of worldviews, of faiths, beliefs, convictions, feelings, concepts, theories or simply of what is the case. Wittgenstein says in Tractatus 1: “The world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein 1922). I agree with all my heart and spirit with Wittgenstein Tractatus 6. 44: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (ibid.). Not how women, men and queer believe secures their dignity, but that they express their beliefs is part of the social realization of their dignity. After having assessed my integrity, I take delight in meditating with my heart and spirit on the fact that the world is.

If we want to get to know testimonies and reflections of religious experiences of Karl Rahner we must turn to spirituality. Catholic medieval theology had banned spirituality from the erudite university discussions to the manuals of ascetic practices. The church fathers of antiquity treated spirituality and mystic experiences as integral and necessary parts of theology. It is allowed to describe Karl Rahner as an important Roman Catholic academic theologian who reintroduced the discourse on spirituality into the Catholic faculties. His publications on spirituality do use the Bible and argue with scriptural narrative.

Leading up to the 400th anniversary of the death of Saint Ignatius (1492-1556), Karl Rahner prepared a series of articles on the Spiritual Exercises and their significance for the spiritual life of the contemporary Christian (Rahner, Karl. 1964. The Dynamic Element in the Church. London: Burns & Oates). Ignatius gives importance to the individual’s religious experience, and Karl Rahner is inspired and encouraged by the example of the founding father of his Jesuit order, who had received the Church’s legitimation for his Spiritual Exercises. On July 31, 1548, Pope Paul III had approved the Spiritual Exercises in the bull Pastoralis officii. Concerning the Election of social choices – that is the individual moral decision -, according to the Spiritual Exercises “ethics cannot entirely consist of a syllogistic deduction in which the major premiss is a general moral principle and the minor premiss is a statement about the relevant situation as the case to which the general principle applies” (Rahner 1964.110). Rahner speaks of an experience of the individual, “the emergence into consciousness of this transcendence (which is certainly requisite, and which distinguishes such a mode of experience from the experience of everyday)” (ibid. 126).

Rahner justifies speaking of an experience of transcendence because “if God speaks, he will certainly do so in such a way as to make himself known to be the speaker with inescapable certainty” (ibid. 127). Rahner defends this experience as being part “of what is normal in a Christian life” (ibid.). Rahner refers to the Spiritual Exercises numbers 330 and 336 and claims “Ignatius speaks of a divine motion in regard to which it is indubitable that it comes from God” (ibid. 131) (See my Posting “Spirituality needs emotions, feelings, and choices”). In number 330 Spiritual Exercises Ignatius calls this motion “consolation without any previous sense or knowledge of any object” (ibid. 132). According to Rahner, “the whole point” for Ignatius “is to recognize in the very first place from the source of the impulse whether it is good”. In a footnote Rahner takes courage to claim: “In other words even in this case Ignatius is seeking a recognition of moral quality of a movement in the soul independently of the analysis of its object” (ibid. 118).This means, that if a couple where one or both partners is or are separated from her husband or his wife, want to marry, and receive in prayer and meditation the consolation without cause, that is inner peace, tranquility and quiet, they are free to decide to marry each other, although the Roman Catholic Canon Law does not allow divorce or a second marriage.

Is it allowed to legitimately claim as Roman Catholic Christian that the experience of God’s love and peace overrules the laws of the Roman Catholic Church because discriminatory church law contradicts “the general principle of natural law, logic and the canons of faith”? Rahner does not dare to affirm positively that question. Hesitantly he rather askes another question to end his investigation into the dynamic element of the Church: The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius “have not yet been transformed into the necessary pages in treatises of moral theology” (ibid. 170)? At least Rahner develops the logic for the social choices of the individual faithful: “It is a logic of concrete individual knowledge which can only be attained in the actual accomplishment of concrete cognition itself, in this instance knowledge of the particular will of God addressed to the individual as such” (ibid. 169).

Pope John Paul II, who reigned the Roman Catholic Church the last two decennials of the 20th century, vehemently opposed such moral theology based on the spiritual experience and social choices of the individual woman, man and queer, insisted on obedience to God’s will that is expressed in the norms and laws of the Roman Catholic Church, and eliminated every moral theologian who held a different view from teaching at Catholic faculties.